Intel wants to improve Stephen Hawking’s speech

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As Stephen Hawking’s condition continues to gradually decline, Intel is stepping forward to try to improve the speed at which the physicist can communicate. Hawking has been battling Lou Gherig’s disease for decades and cannot talk on his own. He relies on a computerized voice synthesizer that he communicates with only by using twitches in his cheek muscle.

Currently the physcist’s proprietary system is connected to a sensor on his eyeglasses. Often he has to spell out words one letter at a time, twitching his cheek to select each character. This inefficient process, combined with Hawking’s deteriorating physical condition, means that Hawking can now only input about one word per minute.

He reached out to Intel to come up with a better solution, and the chipmaker is rising to the occasion. Specifically, Intel chief technology officer (CTO) and director of Intel Labs Justin Rattner is working on a system that could take other facial expressions and gestures to help Hawking dictate his thoughts more easily and quickly, either through some sort of morse code interpretation or a robust facial recognition infrastructure.

Intel is working on a platform that would be able to track Hawking’s mouth and eyebrow movements, steps that it hopes could increase the speed at which he forms words by as much as 10 times faster than he currently can. This will not only aid Hawking in the future but it also advances Intel’s growing interest in smart technologies for the elderly and those with assisted living situations.

For Hawking, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, it is a necessary step if he hopes to continue to provide insights and knowledge to the physics community. Intel has been at the forefront of helping him make that happen since the 1990s, and hopefully it will be able to address these new challenges as well.